The question on that is whether they take a tax writeoff for using their home as a business.
Thats where it starts to get complicated. Start receiving government benefits of some sort and you increase the potential for the government to start ordering you around.
I’d tell this family to do the same thing I think the bakers and photographers are doing: agree to hold the wedding but make it clear that part of the proceeds will be donated to a Christian charity that provides gay conversion therapy.
Heck, they might be able to even put up an advertisement billboard for such a charity thats not within the physical location covered by the contract but IS visible to the wedding goers.
Sorry, not “are” doing but “should be” doing in my above.
A family farm is, throughout the history of this nation, home first. You ask a farmboy in the army where he’s going on leave, he simply says “Home.” He doesn’t say “to the family business.”
I’m sure lawyers would rip into that, but if Sally makes wedding cakes out of her home, then she has ‘home’ as the basis of her sales. And HOME is a basic premise of our Christian faith.
For the farm, though, I’d encourage them to make their farm a Christian outreach catering to religious weddings and accessible by those who agree to a set of religious principles as part of their use of the facility. That way it is never a public accommodation.
As a seasonal paid tax preparer, let me just say that taking a 'tax write-off' is, in some cases, NOT VOLUNTARY! The most obvious example is in taking depreciation on business assets. This is a tax credit against your business income. It is reclaimed against the profit realized upon selling the asset and/or business. If the tax payer does not claim it in the years of the business, it still has to be repaid at the end.
Since I do not work in New York, I cannot point to any other specific items but I am confident that they exist. A very key point to be made is that to be in business is to have 2 or more silent partners, the Federal and state governments. They contribute little but they certainly do demand a lot. This is an example of the regulatory burden placed upon business and personal behavior.
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ON A SEPARATE NOTE: Please note the modern erosion of our citizen rights. Our country's founders never envisioned a society where punishment came from outside the court system. The concept of appointed commissions and non-judicial fines and punishments were anathema to them BUT now they are so common as to be accepted by the sheeple!
From the USLeagal website on the query of jury trial in the US Constitution;
Three separate provisions of the U.S. Constitution provide for the right to a trial by jury. Article III, Sec. 2 provides: “The trial of all crimes shall be by jury and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes have been committed.” The Sixth Amendment says: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state where the said crimes shall have been committed.” Finally, for civil matters, the Seventh Amendment provides: “In all suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined by an court of the United States.”
The import of this move away from jury trial, is that the ordinary citizen cannot appeal to their peers for relief from irrational governance until and unless the case becomes significant and expensive enough to enter the court system. Thus the bureaucrat rules almost unrestrained!
That's part of the problem. How did it become a "government benefit" to not pay income taxes on business expenses?